Who Needs C-3PO When You Have Skype Translator?

Speech recognition has progressed from an interesting-but-glitchy technology to an extremely useful tool in the last 5 years (Thanks Siri!) But now, building on advances in cloud computing, machine learning, and neural networks, there is software that not only to recognize what we say, but translate it into other languages. Yup, human translators may be the next set of workers to be automated out of jobs. You can already use Microsoft’s Skype Translator to initiate a call in English and get it translated pretty much in real-time, to Chinese, French, German, Italian, or Spanish. It also understands and translates instant messages in 50 languages. For many people (well, those who aren’t translators anyway) this is good news, and for long-time Microsoft researcher Fil Alleva it’s the culmination of a dream.…